-Analysis-
PARIS — At the corner of rue de Rivoli and rue Saint-Florentin, on Place de la Concorde, a discreet plaque affixed to what was once the U.S. Consulate General reminds us that it was there on June 5, 1947, that the Marshall Plan was signed. It was the most spectacular demonstration of America’s enlightened generosity in the early days of the Cold War.
For the latest news & views from every corner of the world, Worldcrunch Today is the only truly international newsletter. Sign up here.
Washington’s objective was twofold: first, to save Europeans from the rise of communism at home; and, second, (through NATO two years later) to prevent the advance of Soviet tanks abroad. Throughout the Cold War, America was the free world’s main shield against the great revisionist power that was the USSR.
Will the America of Donald Trump and Elon Musk have joined the “revisionist” camp in 2025, alongside Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Xi Jinping’s China? The provocative question seems, alas, quite legitimate. Trump seems to have taken as his model U.S. President Andrew Jackson (1829-1837), whose priority was “America First.”
Trump II’s territorial expansionism is more reminiscent of Theodore Roosevelt (1901-1909). With a touch of Ronald Reagan (1981-1988) in terms of contradictions. The latter wanted more America in the world, and less state in America. Could these two objectives be reconciled?
Trump’s provocations
Reagan had one major quality for a chief executive. Throughout his two terms, he was lucky. Admittedly, the comparison between Reagan and Trump is difficult. The former almost seems like a dangerous leftist, at least in the eyes of Trump’s inner circle. It’s still too early to say whether the president-elect’s radical and destabilizing comments are just words. Provocations that — when not followed by action — aim to provoke a sense of relief in a chorus of “he’s not so crazy after all.”
Unless — and this is more likely — he is the most serious in the world, and thus reflects the triumph of force in international relations. After Putin’s Russia, Trump’s America?
Biden’s America was internationalist, multilateralist and, despite its trade and protectionism, generally loyal to its allies. Under Trump II, is America on the verge of becoming revisionist, unilateralist and expansionist, in the most classic sense of the word? In the early 1970s, French philosopher Raymond Aron spoke of America as an “imperial republic.” In 2025, there is potentially much less “republic” and much more “imperialism.”
The taste of power
Why shouldn’t the U.S., if not Canada, seize the very real strategic and economic stakes of Greenland and the Panama Canal? Why have allies when you can have vassals? Why negotiate and compromise when you can impose your will?
Let’s be strong, history respects only the strong. Letting the masks down, Trump seems to want to draw inspiration from the precepts of Carl Schmitt, a German jurist and contemporary of Hitler, whose name is no doubt foreign to him.
Beyond Trump’s expansionist temptation, there’s Musk’s interventionist will. It’s fashionable these days among analysts to predict the inevitable divorce between two men with overinflated egos. It’s possible, if not probable. In the meantime, they make an infernal duo.
The 1947 Marshall Plan was designed to prevent Western Europe from falling into the camp of the extreme left, embodied at the time by the Communist Party. Musk, through his control of the social media platform X (and his money), intends to tip Europe into the camp of far-right populism. The Nazi past of some AfD members in Germany not only doesn’t seem to bother him, but satisfies his provocative side.
Is America becoming the main threat to the cause of democracy worldwide?
Musk and Trump respect and even admire authoritarian regimes’ taste for strength — and in fact despise the democratic values of European Union member countries and their cult of weakness.
It used to be said that when America coughed, the world caught a cold. Will the Trump-Musk pairing mobilize the energies of EU member countries against it? Or — and this is, alas, more likely — is Europe likely to oscillate between largely passive opposition and submission, if not rallying to the practices and values of this new America.
There are, of course, elements of continuity between Trump’s America and that of his predecessors. Protectionist temptation did not start with Trump, nor did the mixture of indifference and contempt for Europe that now prevails on the other side of the Atlantic.
A Copernican revolution
In the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall, followed by that of the USSR, NATO was orphaned from the threat that had been its raison d’être. Now, 35 years later, is the Western world orphaned from its protector and model? Is America becoming, along with Russia, the main threat to Europe and beyond and to the cause of democracy worldwide?
It’s a period of history that comes to an end.
In May 1910, King Edward VII’s funeral in London was the last major diplomatic event, before the continent fell into a war that led to its irremediable decline. In January 2025, will U.S. President Jimmy Carter’s funeral in Washington have the same symbolic significance for the world as Edward VII’s for Europe?
In both cases, it’s not just a man we’re burying, it’s a period of history that comes to an end. The European order in the first case, the Pax Americana in the second. Europe is coming to realize that it must not exist, as it thought, “without America,” but perhaps, facing it, if not against it.
Faced with what amounts to a veritable Copernican revolution, the question facing Europe is always the same. Except that it is now being asked with unprecedented acuity. Can we be a model if we are no longer a player? How can Europe wave the banner of law in the face of force, in its current state of division and confusion?
